I Love You, Beth Cooper

Two months ago, before getting the plane to Dublin, I went looking in the Boston airport for a book to read on the flight. I wound up buying a copy of I Love You, Beth Cooper by Larry Doyle, since even much my reading material lately centers on movies.

I read a good portion of the book before I landed in Ireland. What interested me most, actually, was the introduction where Doyle, who also wrote the screenplay, discusses the process of writing the book (with the intention that it would become a screenplay), and then turning it into a fullblown script.

One of the issues I remember is that he was disappointed that he had to tone down the sexual raunchiness so much from the book version in order to get it on film. To be honest, there is a lot of gross stuff in the book.

In any case, when I finally got around to seeing I Love You, Beth Cooper in Leominster last week, I felt like I was completing a special project. After many weeks I was at last going to get to see the film version that I had anticipated all during my trip.

When I read the book, one of the things that seemed really strange to me was how much of it was "internal"---that is, prose that described things that could not be seen by the camera. Considering that Doyle wrote the book with the idea of movie in mind, this seemed rather odd to me. It did not all read like a book adapted from a screenplay. If I hadn't known, I wouldn't have thought it was intended originally as "the ultimate teen movie," which is how Doyle himself described the goal of his project.

Given that, while reading the first couple chapters of the book, I had obsessed with trying to figure out which of the highly visual details would actually make it into the film. During the opening first few minutes in Leominster, I was quite surprised at how little of it actually did.

For example, in the book, during the opening scene in the high school graduation ceremony when Dennis confesses his nerdly love for the head cheerleader, Doyle makes a big deal about how hot it is in the gynmasium. Everyone is sweaty and uncomfortable, and just wants to get out of the place.

This aspect was completely absent from Chris Columbus' screen version. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just that I was surprised. In fact, I can state that it probably wasn't necessary in retrospect. There is enough tension from the basics of the story itself. Likewise was dropped the fact that Dennis Cooverman's seat is right next to Beth's, and that he trips and falls into her seat when he returns from his valedictory speech. That too wasn't necessary for the screen story.

In retrospect it seems that Larry Doyle vastly overwrote the book, so as to have a rich variety of details from which to construct a screen version. Of course most novels are like that by their nature, but in the case where the book was written specifically to become a movie, it makes for a special case study of how these transitions work.

As for the story, I was really impressed at how quickly it sped through the story, and how few of the charactes in the book were necessary to drive the essential action. At times it felt almost too smooth and sleak, and I kept remembering Doyle's intention to write the "ultimate teen movie."

What surprised me most perhaps was the level of raunchiness. From the book, and from Doyle's own words, I was expecting a full-on raunchfest. Instead, if anything, the movie errs on the sweet and sentimental side. On screen, it felt much more like a genuine love story between the characters---a real teen romance in the guise of a sex comedy.

For the most part, this is a solid decent story that was fun to watch. The Postmodern touch of having characters consciously quote lines from other movies felt a little awkward at times, but I'm not a fan of that kind of self-reference, even if it has become part of our culture. It's the ultimate aspect of the Postmodern disease---that we have come to rely on fictional and virtual characters for our role models instead of other humans, and moreover that these virtual characters are now, after many years, based on other virutal characters instead of humans.

But the life force always must win out in a romance, and like I said, my biggest surprise was how much this was genuine love story. To that end, the basic journeys of the two principal characters are the familiar ones I have described to anyone reading my previous entries.

To wit, as the Postmodern teen hero, Dennis must learn that being a man means asserting himself through the "Risky Business" of announcing his sincere desire to a woman. In the opening scene of the movie, he fulfills this in spectacular way, and in Classical story terms, the entire rest of the movie is his "reward" for his boldness, even it doesn't seem that way (the hero must meet with difficulties, after all, or else you don't have a movie). His biggest challenge, in story terms, is not really the cast of adversaries who come after him and his friends, but rather his tendency to retreat from his bold actions by apologizing to Beth for them.

Likewise Beth, her protective bitch bubble having been penetrated by this sincere advance, must learn to connect with her true feminine principle of love and compassion, which she does. Along that lines, I was somewhat impressed by Hayden Panettiere, who is definitely not another a Megan Fox, thank god.

All in all, I was impressed by Doyle's screenplay, even if it felt a little constructed. But maybe that was just because I had read his own descriptions. I'm not surprised that the movie hasn't been a blockbuster. It just isn't raunchy enough. It's too sweet, in the end.

I should mention that the movie got extra points from me for a good use of the Magic Cow of Happiness, during a scene in which Dennis and Beth are alone together for the first time. The comedic use of the cattle here perfectly matched the tone and theme of the love story, during the entire movie and especially during that scene. The magic cow never fails!